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I’m leery of the concept of ‘truth’ (this is jazzman territory, btw). It seems to me that humans use concepts as tools to comprehend the universe we are animate, sentient constituents of. Since we’re so visually oriented, allow me to use the metaphor of ‘lens’ for ‘concept’.

Lenses can yield fuzzy images, sharp images, refracted images, tinted images, narrow images, and wide images (at least!). Using a religious analogy (which I don’t subscribe to), let’s say that archaic Theia was a very fuzzy lens for human apprehension, appreciation, and comprehension of ‘God’. Fuzzy because it cast the godhead in the wrong gender, and, worse yet, it refracted, yielding a multiple image: making ‘God’ appear to be 12 instead of one.
In comparison, ancient ‘Zeus’ was a conceptualization of ‘God’ that was still fuzzy and partially refractive yet much sharper than Theia: male, a thunderbolt wielder, and sovereign of the heavens.
Indeed, Zeus is very nearly the Biblical God whose scriptures, by way of culture, commerce, violence, and plenty of wishful belief, have colonized the minds of billions of humans: ‘He’ is the image we see coming through the sharpest conceptual lens of all for ‘God.’
So, is He ‘true’?
Or is this question a matter of opinion?
And where does this leave Spinoza’s significantly impersonal conceptualization of ‘God’?

My only objection (an admittedly disputable one) to that definition is that I understand ‘belief’ as the “mental acceptance of the truth or actuality of something” (as my American Heritage Dictionary defines it), which would indicate instead that ‘opinion’, with its (laudable) implied admission of uncertainty, approaches but falls short of ‘belief’.
I tend to see ‘beliefs’ as conceptual straightjackets: once you’ve fully accepted a belief, relinquishing it requires intellectual struggle—and honesty—akin to Houdini’s legendary escape-artist efforts.

I gauge it better to withhold surrender of one’s credulity, to refrain from ‘belief’ (and especially its idiot-savant child called ‘faith’), in favor of provisional mental acceptances, like hypotheses and theories, since those conceptual formulations imply conditional, tentative acceptance of proposed explanations. Hypotheses and theories rely on empirically-derived slates of evidence, allowing the acceptor to freely modify or abandon the proposed explanations as evidence accumulates or is refuted. (For everyday language purposes, I class hypotheses and theories as plauses since their plausibility depends on the accumulation of corroborative slates of evidence.)

Merriam-Webster Online defines ‘belief’ as: “conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence” http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/belief
‘Plause’ is weaker than that, since it doesn’t demand ‘conviction’, but only enough credulity to allow the ‘plauser’ to proceed provisionally, tentatively operating as if the proposed explanation might be valid.

Physicist Lee Smolin describes the operation of science as the repeated testing of proffered explanations until they are either rejected as largely false (conceptualizations giving an overly fuzzy and or otherwise distorted image) or until they finally, by accretion and refinement: ‘pass from theory into knowledge’, meaning that they are understood to represent ‘objective truth’ – understood, in my lens metaphor, to have been ground so as to yield the sharpest possible image.
Considering the limits of 21st century English, that’s the closest to a reasonable description of the goals of objective science I’m currently aware of. It’s troubled by the inescapable retention of some small magnitude of subjectivity (this is jazzman territory again). Hence my leeriness over the notion that any explanation is ever ‘infallibly true’.

For eons humankind could ‘see’ that the Sun circled the Earth. Memorialized (ex post facto) by the moniker “the geocentric model”, this ‘truth’ relied on what in hindsight was a very, VERY fuzzy conceptual lens. Isn’t it safe to say that the heliocentric model offers its conceptualizers a markedly sharper image? An image much more worthy of the characterization ‘approaching objective truth’?

What’s the difference then between the first series of ‘lenses’ I offer above (Theia/Zeus/Yahweh/Spinoza’s impersonal ‘God’) and the geocentric/heliocentric series?
As far as I can discern, it’s the availability—or lack thereof—of empirically-derived corroborative evidence. We’ve not a whit of evidence to support the putative existence of ‘the divine’. The Sun, on the other hand, we feel on our skins and depend upon for sustenance (because even animals must, at some point, whether directly or indirectly, consume photosynthesized elements of the food-web). Our earliest ancestors evolved organs to discern the living and nonliving forms and patterns sunlight shines on, and we now conceptualize these organs as ‘eyes’.

Our concept called “the Sun” is about as close to an ‘objectively true’ descriptor as most anything I can think of. ‘God’, on the other hand, is a concept that appears to rely not on evidence from our senses but on our credulity: its existence might be subjectively true to many or even to most people, but not one of them can provide a quantity—of any size—of supporting evidence to earn the concept the descriptor: ‘approaching objective truth’. It is a legacy of an extensive mosaic of ancient concepts cobbled together as proposed explanations for the awesome universe science has, in the past couple of centuries, largely demystified.

So, here’s the paradox: the lenses we use to demystify the universe – scientific explanations whose provenance is the human preoccupation with data in the quest for ‘objective truth’ – share the same brains with the lenses whose provenance is our credulity: our wish to “believe the truth” of childhood thrillers. We absorb novels – which we KNOW to be fictions – with the same conceptual lens-viewing-apparatus as that with which we absorb science, or with which we absorb the confusing economic environment we try to subsist within. In fact, we absorb fictions with the same conceptual-lens-viewing apparatus as that with which we very simply absorb and accept our sensory experiences: we don’t just ‘feel’ the Sun on our skins – we name it, we name the skin, we judge it either, hot, warm, or (at this time of year in the parts of the Northern Hemisphere) not-hot-enough-by-god!

We conceptualize fictions and facts with equal weight. It’s a bit like TV: you can tune the thing to a Hollywood movie or to PBS documentary, but it will look pretty much the same either way, and you’ll absorb either choice with more or less the same mental/conceptual lens-apparatus.
Is it any wonder people believe so much unsubstantiated myth?

Is it hopeless? I don’t think so.
I suggest that we can better conceptualize our conceptual systems. We can rethink them. Rename them. We can recognize that evidence supported concepts (heliocentric solar system, cigarette-promoted cancers) differ in essence from wholly fanciful concepts (gods, elves, fairies, and devils), and begin to class them differently.

Is it the same to ‘believe in’ the existence of the Sun as it is to ‘believe in’ the existence of the supernatural—in ‘God’?
Why should our tangible experience of the Sun be classed alongside that of the supernatural? If nearly every living human can feel the heat of sunlight on skin, but only ‘believers’ can feel “God’s love”, isn’t the latter more subjective by a full magnitude at least? Doesn’t the former rely on physical experience while the latter relies entirely on teachings—on belief?
Yet in our minds, they seem to exist as veritable equals.
How strange.

I submit that by rethinking, revaluing, and reclassing our minds-chock-full-of-parallel-concepts, we can revolutionize not only how we understand the world but also how we understand our own largely unfathomable personal natures. And even, and perhaps best of all: the way we view and treat our world’s other sentient, feeling beings.

The above “response” is in fact the original post from ROS, which I posted on an overflow blog just in case the ROS folks deem it too dang long for their blog (it probably is, too). I’m not sure how this link ended up here though. (I’m new to the minutia of blogging.)